Trick
by Mariel Nightstalker
Summary: Harry is tricked by a demon.


**Trick**

There was no warning, no ripple in the cloth of his everyday routine to warn him. His alarm went off when it was meant to, he didn't burn his eggs, and the bus was on time. His favorite shirt smelled like clean laundry and his evergreen soap. He sniffed his collar now and scented sulphur and, oddly enough, cinnamon. He would never see cinnamon the same way again.

Red skinned, black lipped, she was a vision.

Vision or not, he was still tied by his four limbs to a throne of thorns. They didn't prick too badly, but the threat was there should he shift his weight wrong. He held deathly still and tried not to breathe too much.

How he'd ended up at the mercy of this woman was difficult to explain. One moment he'd been making his way from the bus station to the innocuous insurance agency he worked at, admiring the birdsong; and the next moment there was a howling sound, the scent of burning hair, and then he fell down a hole in the ground that shouldn't have been there. He walked the same route to work everyday. He knew every crack and every crevice. There was no gaping channel to Hell last he checked.

She was waiting for him when he dropped to the bottom, and then through a series of blurred movements and with a horned creature's assistance, he was bound in his current predicament.

He tried not to notice too much that she was naked from the waist up save for a necklace of tiny skulls and tufts of hair he feared was human. There was a twist of brilliant blond hair that reminded him of Fleur Weasley. He felt nauseous at the thought.

"Do you know why you're here?"

Her lips didn't move, but he heard her.

He shook his head.

"You are dissatisfied, Harry. We both know why. You slaved your youth away in the service of a war you didn't start, and then, just as victory was roaring in your ears, you lost the one thing that had kept you going-"

He opened his mouth to protest, and she ignored him.

"-Don't pretend otherwise, Harry. Your magic was your life. It made you feel strong; it made you unafraid that you were smaller and weaker than your friends and enemies. You had your own strength. We don't need to talk about what happened to you after your…loss…was discovered."

He closed his eyes. No one had talked to him about Ginny in years. It'd been years since he'd spoken to any of the old crowd, truthfully. There just…wasn't much to say anymore.

"I know how much this hurt you, so I pulled some strings and I got it back for you."

His eyes opened wide. He gawked at her, unable to speak or believe.

"There's just one condition. I need you to do me a little favor."

Gasping for words, he found them and pledged her anything she wanted, anything at all. It was stupid in retrospect, but it'd been so long since he'd felt that tingle in his blood. Without his magic everything looked dull. It was like his word had gone from French toast to oatmeal and he didn't know how to get the sugary toast back ever again.

Living a joyless gray life would make anyone desperate.

But in his ecstasy, a flash of reason made him pause. Surely this was too good to be true. As though she could read his thoughts, the red-skinned woman came away from the fire pit she'd been hovering near and laid her hand on his shoulder. He faintly noticed that his bonds were loosed, and that the throne was smooth stone now. It was cold.

"Let me do this for you. Please."

He nodded.

~000~

A week later, the Prime Minister was assassinated by an unknown entity.

A month after that, the economic and political infrastructure of Europe collapsed. Asia followed, then the Americas, and Australia followed. Africa was over-run by natural disasters that kept them shut off from the rest of the world.

Politicians, what few remained, promised change and solutions to the worsening conditions. Twenty years of steady famine that eventually reached even the most fertile areas of the planet made them all liars. Maddened by poverty and frustration, revolts and brawls broke out around the world. Disease, spurred on by lack of sanitation, poor hygiene, and lack of proper diet killed three fourths of the population. All but the strongest perished. Entire races disappeared. Religious extremism led the remaining population to execute a substantial fraction of their numbers.

Civilization sank into the sea, not to be seen again for a thousand more years, when the cycle would doubtless repeat.

Harry killed himself within the first year. Some prices are too high to pay.

~000~

In Hell, he dragged himself through agonies and tortures too numerous to count and suffered humiliations too terrible to consider to find his way to the red-skinned woman again.

She sat in her fire pit, chewing a chicken's foot.

He only had one question.

"Why?"

She shrugged.

"I don't know what you did, but my master has hated you since your birth."

Somehow, Harry had already suspected that.

~000~

End Trick

Not very Thanksgiving-esque, but I wanted to do something random.


End file.
